Ford Foundation Building

Ford Foundation Building
42nd. Street Façade from Tudor City
General information
Architectural style	Late Modernism
Town or city	320 East 43rd Street New York, NY
Country	United States
Construction started	1963
Completed	1968
Cost	$16,000,000,
Client	Ford Foundation
Technical details
Structural system	concrete and steel frame
Design and construction
Architect	Kevin Roche
Structural engineer	John Dinkeloo

Coordinates: 40°44′59″N 73°58′16″W / 40.74972°N 73.97111°W / 40.74972; -73.97111

320 East 43rd Street

The Ford Foundation Building is an office building in Midtown Manhattan designed by architect Kevin Roche and his engineering partner, John Dinkeloo. Designed in 1963 and completed in 1968 on the former site of the Hospital for Special Surgery, its large tree-filled atrium was the first of its kind in Manhattan, and it is widely credited as setting the precedent for indoor public spaces in Manhattan office buildings. The building was one of the first that Roche-Dinkeloo produced after they became heads of Eero Saarinen's firm, following his death in 1961. It won the AIA Twenty-five Year Award in 1995.

In October 2016, the Ford Foundation Building began a major renovation and restoration project that will reinvigorate the building’s mission—ensuring that it works for far more people, is open to the public, and serves as an uplifting and energizing space for change.

The twelve-story box represents an evolutionary approach to expanding the limits of International Style modern architecture by exploring new architectural vocabulary, new materials, and new environmental controls. The architects aimed to restore the social function of modernism, furthering the goal of human community through facilitation of effective charity by the Ford Foundation. Not abandoning the modernist principles they learned at IIT, they added new ideas to the stagnating concept of the modern office building, which had been unchanged from the completion of the Seagram Building and Lever House.